


Snakebite and Black

by phantomreviewer



Series: Gorgon!Grantaire [1]
Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Creatures & Monsters, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Fluff, Getting Together, M/M, Misunderstandings, Mythical Beings & Creatures, Pining, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-30
Updated: 2015-08-30
Packaged: 2018-04-18 03:44:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,788
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4690853
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phantomreviewer/pseuds/phantomreviewer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“It is good to have a gorgon among us,” Courfeyrac said once, when Grantaire was new to the society, never one to shy aware from a necessary conversation, “a symbol of life and protection.”</p><p>His wine was bitter, but he swallowed it anyway. The truth was not worth wasting wine over.</p><p>“I have never seemingly brought myself any such protection.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Snakebite and Black

**Author's Note:**

> A snakebite and black is a drink in the UK made up of equal parts cider and lager with a splash of blackcurrant, I'm quite ashamed that I didn’t manage to work it into the fic somewhere, so the title it is. Considering that Grantaire’s snakes are Black Mambas which are known for the inside of their mouths being black and being highly venomous it felt highly appropriate, not to mention that it is Grantaire.

His mother had had the most beautiful thick hair. It had fallen across her shoulders like the waves of the ocean and Grantaire still has hazy memories of fisting his chubby fingers into it as she’d rocked him to sleep, whispering tales of Anthousa the Fair with Golden Hair and Donkeyskin, flitting from language to language with a lilting grace that Grantaire would never be able to replicate, even after a life time of growing up within a European medley. She had been Greek, and the blue eyed charm - inscribed with Nerine - which hangs across his neck was once hers. The olive tint to his skin had been a gift from his mother as well.

It was all the more ironic, having been brought up on the tales of the ancient gods and the modern powers that the curse was born from his father.

He’d never been told the true reason for the curse, told that it was not his business – as though it was his father who was snatched away from the life he had known and turned more monstrous than the figures who stalked childhood stories – only that it was his father’s guilt to bear. Grantaire was not sure if he truly wanted to know his father’s crime, such a crime that it rid his only son of his humanity, but that he have never been given the opportunity to know burnt. His father had never shown any remorse for his crime, for his curse, and it was unlikely that it would ever be broken. Had Grantaire been able to break it, if it had been within his own power to change his fate then perhaps his life may have taken a different turn, but no matter the songs that his mother sung to him as a babe, the choice was not his to make. He had no power but the power given to him in snakeskin and poison.

He had been a cherubim child, with fat fingers, a full face and thick black curls and he knows that his mother wept when his curls turned to coils, his eyes went narrow and his blood ran cold. He knows that somewhere there are photographs of him from _before_ but he’s never seen them. He has never asked to see the possibility of what could have been, he understands himself only as he is now. As a gorgon.

It was addressed as a known fact that gorgons brought luck to those who wore their symbol; it was ironic the numbers of people who would wear the _gorgoneion_ tattoo’d or embellished on a jet-necklace but would shy away from Grantaire. The people who would clutch at their emblems while flinching from his gaze and would turn away once they noticed the writhing mass where his hair should be. Grantaire did not blame them, not really. It must be a horrifying sight, he’s become accustomed to it by now.

“It is good to have a gorgon among us,” Courfeyrac said once, when Grantaire was new to the society, never one to shy aware from a necessary conversation, “a symbol of life and protection.”

His wine was bitter, but he swallowed it anyway. The truth was not worth wasting wine over.

“I have never seemingly brought myself any such protection.”

Not all members of Les Amis are human, but it is considered rude to ask. Only Grantaire cannot hide what he is, he has no glamours or spells which could hide how _othered_ he is. His snakes don’t hide, tumbling across his shoulders and quietly hissing when they feel like they’re being ignored and his eyes, while they can be cloaked behind glasses or darkness, are ever present. He could wear contact lenses to cover them, there are subsidised collections for those afflicted with nonhumanity, but no matter what he disguises himself as Grantaire isn’t human and he can’t hide that knowledge from himself.

Enjolras though, Grantaire thinks that Enjolras cannot be fully human. Perhaps he’s a siren, or was born with the blood of the sphinx, there was something too _much_ in Enjolras. In his rich eyes and his smooth skin and far too much in the total sum of his heart. Enjolras was ever present, in a way that mortal men should never be. Too much. In his dark and perfect appearance and in his gait, perhaps he had been built directly by the gods, not birthed by human minds or bodies. He’d voiced this once, with too much wine on his breath and Enjolras slumped ungracefully across the table from him, smiling open and honest, only part-way listening to Grantaire’s ramblings and half clumsily applauding the revolving karaoke singers of their friends. Enjolras had snorted, almost but not quite unkindly, at being told that Grantaire thought of him as beyond human. “As though you have to be something beyond human to be great.” It had been a sobering kick in the gut, those casual words, for Grantaire was anything but human, and well aware that he was anything but great.

His snakes were magnificent. Even Grantaire would admit that, despite the terror they could instil and what they represented, they were monstrous and fabulous in one. Mottled ash-grey, sleek and smooth with an inky-black bite, they were stunning and scaled. _Dendroaspis polylepis,_ highly venomous and not at all rare or endangered, the one of the more common snakes for those of the gorgonic persuasion, according to Combeferre, who had conducted research as though it mattered the name of them; they were part of Grantaire as much as his teeth and fingernails. They couldn’t speak, but hissed and spat poison when they felt cornered, they writhed and showed their displeasure at any sort of hat or covering despite the necessity for warmth in the colder months, and they only occasionally bit.

Once every four months Joly sat him down, donned a pair of gardening gloves and the regulation goggles which he had traded Combeferre a wheel of brie for, to milk his venom. He said that it was necessary, someone had to do it. The first time the snakes had fought, but Joly’s hands were always steady.

You could buy kits off the internet these days, if you milked the venom yourself then sent it along to be processed you could have an antivenin within the month. Curses had become commercialised. It was a simple enough procedure, but it was best conducted by another with the need to grab one of the snakes by the head and forcing their fangs to bite down on the skin of a balloon stretched over a glass.

It didn’t hurt, someone else touching the snakes – although people rarely did- but there was a dissidence, as though there was a layer of film between the touch and himself. Grantaire had overheard Joly and Combeferre detailing the neurological makeup of gorgons once, it had been quiet, clearly they did not intend him to overhear, and he had felt no need to interrupt with his first-hand knowledge, had they wanted it they could have asked. But he could feel Joly’s tense fingers on one snake, while the others writhe and hiss but make no move towards him. Joly always favours the snakes to the right side of his head, he doesn’t know why, they’re not individuals, they don’t have personality or will of their own, not really. But he can exercise a modicum of control other their behaviour, however tenuous, and they appear to be used to Joly’s regular – if medical – touch. He is grateful enough for that.

The snakes are hard to domesticate, and impossible to train. The nature of the beast meets the nature of man. That is what the gorgon represented – the loss of self. The madness within man and the human within the animal.  It had come up once, how to tame the serpent-minded, in a conversation which was built around hypotheticals as opposed to reality, about what a gorgon could contribute. Not as Grantaire, but as a gorgon. As a place of safety, as the symbolism of luck and divine protection. Had they a gorgon visible bodyguard, with slitted eyes and snakes wild then no one would dare touch the triumvirate, at least they would consider debating with their words as opposed to their fists.

Enjolras doesn’t approve of the idea of using Grantaire, even hypothetically – he clearly doesn’t trust him, although to be fair to Enjolras he doesn’t trust him because he is Grantaire as opposed to being a gorgon. The man’s principles have never been lacking. The judgement which is brought down on him has been brought down by his actions as opposed to the circumstances of fate.

He’d never turned anyone to stone, but he knew that he could. He felt it sometimes, it twitched under eyeballs, like a migraine. And he knew that while his slitted pupils disturbed people sometimes, most found his jovial temper well enough to bear the details of his nature, his heavy laugh and his deep purse as an open offer of friendship, but he also could count those who turned away. The suspicion that decorated his words and actions, the slick slide of scale over his scalp in the quiet. The sight at a distance was reason enough for people to turn away and up close the unhuman slit of his eyes could shy away any possible admirer who had expected something exotic and fun. He was dangerous, and his very person would not let him or anyone else forget it.

He was always left alone by strangers when he had the sunglasses on – a gift from the dynamic duo, tinted yellow as enough of a joke to make Grantaire smile and enough of a warning to make others wary, it was instinct buried deep down in the subconscious that yellow meant danger even to modern eyes the deep brain cried out caution – even Enjolras would treat more carefully around him. Probably concerned that Grantaire would make good on his comments that Enjolras was fine marble. He’d never do it, he could never do it, not on purpose, but it was always safest to keep temptation away, a stare too long and everyone he knew would be dead stone. Joly had reassured him that the antivenin could be processed into a gel – if combined with some of his blood in time – which should technically unpetrify anyone that he reduced to rock, but Grantaire wasn’t sure. He’s never done it, he never wants to. But he knows that it happens. His snakes have lashed out in the past, and one day his gaze will catch. He hopes that it isn’t someone he knows, and then hates himself and hopes that it is. Whoever it is he knows that he’ll have their frozen, appalled stare locked into his mind forever no matter the outcome.

It’s been a week with a yellow-tinged world before he takes them off and sees the world as it is.

Enjolras has been notably quiet over the week, he looks magnificent even as the world glows yellow, but Grantaire has been careful not to look for too long. While Enjolras has always tolerated Grantaire’s presence, perhaps his patience has been wearing thin. Enjolras approaches well to openness, and Grantaire closing away his gaze – no matter how lethal it may be – could not have been taken well for extended periods of time. His lack of contribution has been a matter of contestation for months now. With his friends vouching for him in ways he’s not sure he believes are necessary or even earnt.

He is not a brave man, if he counts as a man at all, but he is there and he comes and he intends to stay, for what it is worth. That is, if Enjolras is willing to let him.

Grantaire can see Enjolras standing close, hand outreached and he expects the contact to brush against his shoulder. Grantaire may be weak, but he cannot quite bring himself to move away from the promise of Enjolras’ touch, waiting to interpret Enjolras’ actions. His snakes have coiled away from his shoulders, twisting _en masse_ despite the temptation of touch.

People dislike the snakes and people don’t touch the snakes, it’s not personal. It is a due to what Grantaire is and not who Grantaire is. They even bite Grantaire from time to time, the venom doing him no harm, being absorbed back into his blood stream. He is toxic from the inside out. It is not personal that people avoid their touch. Joly touches them every for months, even layered in gloves it’s still touch, but even Courfeyrac the most tactile of Les Amis, who is willing to sling his arms over Grantaire’s shoulders and press wet kisses to his cheeks doesn’t ruffle his snakes as he plays with Jehan’s or even Enjolras’ hair. He doesn’t take offense.

Ophidiophobia is common enough among people -completely logical, harking back from a time of bare feet and dangerous things lingering in the grass, rattling and hissing and invoking danger in every twist and turn - even the common or garden snakes that can be found hiding under stones and utterly harmless unless pestered are enough to find people squealing and shrieking. Grantaire’s snakes are anything but utterly harmless, and they are wholly inescapable when encountering Grantaire. This can only make them objects of further fear. Both poor Cosette and Marius are frightened of the snakes, he can tell, but they both smile at him and Cosette without fail asks after them, as though they are pets and not a part of his physique, and she recommends tonics and powders that her father has heard about. Grantaire will never take her up on any of her offers to look into such strange medications for scale rot or smoothness, he does no such thing for the rest of him, there would be no point in attempting to make fear beautiful, but he thanks her nonetheless. He often feels that he does not deserve the friends that he has been gifted with, no one could deserve them.

He rarely feels required to cover his ashen serpents, let other people’s prejudices be damned, but he’ll tuck them away – as much as they’ll allow themselves to be tucked – under a hood or beanie should the star struck lovers say for any length of time, he does love his friends.

The detached warmth of Enjolras’ fingers filters through his senses and Grantaire twitches, snakes recoiling.

“What on earth are you doing?” His snakes coil up into tight knots on Grantaire’s head, as far away from Enjolras’ hand as they can reach – he hadn’t thought that he’d trained them that well, all they want to do is feel the warmth of actually being touched. He can feel their phantom desires, echoing his own.

He pulls the beanie on inexpertly, batting away their fanged protestations with pricked fingers. His head writhes strangely under the knit. Enjolras still hasn’t answered.

“They’re toxic, they could _kill_ you.”

“They could, but you wouldn’t, would you?”

And for once, Grantaire can’t think of anything to fill the silence and Enjolras is looking for too sincere even with one hand awkwardly hovering about his shoulder.

It wasn’t Enjolras, but Grantaire who flinched away, and he doesn’t understand it, but it still happened.

Just as the moon rotates her cycle, bringing life and sanctuary from the werefolk, so does Grantaire’s mood ebb and flow. It has been going well, but wine is flowing and Grantaire has never been fully stable. While he never has turned anyone, far too aware of himself even when he has passed the point of sobriety, it is better to be safe than it would be to be sorry.

He does not want to test the rumours of Combeferre that he’d heard of a woman being turned back from stone in India, or that the science implies that reversal is entirely possible if conducted under the right conditions. So he’s wearing the glasses again, they live in his pocket, to be slipped on and slipped off when the circumstance calls for it.  Joly and Bossuet are laughing at something he’s said, he’s drank his way through at least one bottle of the house red, red-lipped and loose tongued. But he is talking now and the words keep coming. He only lulls to a halt when the lights eventually dim, and behind the tinted glass he struggles to see.

He struggles to see to the extent that when the glasses are removed, by hands other than his, he squints and freezes.

It is Enjolras, staring into his eyes as though he wasn’t doing the equivalent of poking a sleeping dragon. Is this some challenge or some dare, stare into the eyes of a drunken gorgon and remain flesh. There is the taste of alcohol between them, and Grantaire knows what he’s been drinking and it wasn’t the spicy punch of rum in the air. His snakes can taste the air and the phantom taste fizzles in the back of Grantaire’s senses. For a moment neither of them breathes, but the snakes hiss blearily on his head. Sometimes they get intoxicated too, knocking into each other and twisting into patterns which would be impossible to undo if they were not living beings themselves.

There’s a hand at his temple, and only a fingertip brushing the crown of one of his snakes, snakes tired and twisting and seeking heat. The semblance of control which he has over them dissipates, and he could not say if there were due to the wine or Enjolras’ hot, enticing fingers. That’s another argument of Enjolras being more than human, he runs so warm, despite being cold blooded himself with little frame of reference, Enjolras is surely hotter than any mortal man ought to be. And he has been mocked for saying that without eloquence, has been told to shut up and stop making blanket statements, been wolf-whistled at and teased. But now it feels anything but a joke. His words have dried up, this always seems to happen around Enjolras. No one else can numb his tongue, although he’s getting better at speaking through the silences, although not now.

“I thought so.”

One of Enjolras’ hands is tight around Grantaire’s sunglasses, and the other has found itself entwined with snakes and Enjolras sits, wide-eyed and seemingly without fear. This time Grantaire doesn’t pull away and they both stay, frozen as though Grantaire’s control had finally slipped. It hasn’t, because he could feel the beat of Enjolras’ heart heavy in his fingertips even through the veneer of gorgonic biology. They are both flesh, and hope.

Something changes after that night, and Grantaire’s snakes are the first to react to it. Where they had once been marginally docile, the only whims that they tenuously obeyed being Grantaire’s, now they beckon towards Enjolras unprompted. No longer content to knot across Grantaire’s head - leaving the impression of chin length curls - instead they elongate, they twirl and they hiss spontaneously, with no impetuous other than the proximity of Enjolras. It is almost as though they smile in the presence of Enjolras, suddenly they reach out, coiling loosely to his shoulders, sliding out and over. It is almost hypnotic, he has caught Enjolras staring more than once.

They talk more now, they share jokes over cups of coffee made in their respective kitchens, they bicker and they tease each other with a casual intimacy that could only have been achieved by time. Grantaire manages to makes Enjolras laugh so hard that he snorts his drink out of his nose, and they’ve walked, arm in arm, smiling softly and both listening. They talks about more serious issues as well.

Enjolras apparently wants a relationship. A relationship with him built out of admiration and _want_ as opposed to circumstance and comradery. It is the golden apple, a relationship with Enjolras. And Grantaire has become very familiar with temptation, how he wants. But he’s self-aware as well as selfish, and no one wants to be intimate with a gorgon. Even though Enjolras has always seen him as a man as opposed to a monster it doesn’t stop it being there between them. Enjolras is human, despite his protestations, while Grantaire is not. Which is not to say that he has been cast into the wilderness alone, Grantaire has known people, known them in more ways than he imagines that Enjolras could dream of. He has had relationships, he’s slept with people, he has experienced humanity at its full, detected as he is. There are always people willing to sleep with him, he’s lithe and talented in the bedroom. He has to be looking as he does, with hair that hisses and eyes that could burn, but he hasn’t had the sort of relationship that he thinks that Enjolras is asking for. A relationship where you wake up with someone carding their fingers through his hair – had he any – or the desire to be with, or the comfort to be apart.

But Enjolras is persistent and radiant. They’re outside the Corinthe, leaning against the brick work and taking lazy sips from iced lattes, basking in the sunshine and this is a conversation that they had had before.

“This isn’t safe Enjolras.”

His crossed arms, closing himself in, are contrasted and betrayed by the snakes, winding quiet and content against the redbrick behind him. Even as he tightens his arms he can’t help but sink back into the warmth of the stone behind him. He knows that it makes him look more feline than reptilian to be basking in the heat.

Enjolras, who has kicked off from his own perch, has serious eyes but is fighting a smile which would betray his tone.

“You won’t hurt me,” says Enjolras, and it is as if he truly believes it. As though he hasn’t trod softly around him when his eyes have been shades or looked away when Grantaire has furrowed his brow.

“I could.” He needs Enjolras to understand, it’s not just other people’s fear that has kept them away. There are lines and there are boundaries, and there are acceptable risks to take with other people and how would Grantaire feel if he hurt anyway, if he turned anyone, especially Enjolras.

“Yes, yes you could, and I could hurt you.”

He’s speaking so casually, even as the smile has hardened up into a tight and beautiful frown marring an otherwise perfect face. Enjolras truly acts as though they are comparable, as though Enjolras’ deservedly harsh words are the equivalent of fangs and venom and rock.

“You couldn’t irreversibly turn me to stone Enjolras, you couldn’t poison me. It’s not the same.”

Enjolras huffs, as though Grantaire’s concerns were childish, and steps closer. Leaving Grantaire pinned against the wall, more by his own mind and unwillingness to stet away than from the presence of his body, but he’s still close. There is warmth coming from in front as well as behind.

“Do you think I don’t know the risks-” “That’s what I’m trying to tell you, you don’t!” “- the risks of running the ABC, everyone is here willingly I know that, but at what cost. This path that we are leading ourselves down, it’s a dangerous route for people like us and for people like me, and we are bringing that danger on ourselves. I am helping to target that danger directly towards the people I love. Those are the risks that we’re taking, can you honestly say that you don’t think that I’m scared?”

Enjolras is panting faintly, his breath tangibly warm on Grantaire’s skin and the sensation and the passion is almost, almost enough to let himself give in. But this is a different passion and a different cause to be fought for. Grantaire can’t let himself be caught up in the choice of words, although when said his heart caught a beat, because Enjolras is extrapolating again, saving the world and dating Grantaire are two different impossibilities.

“That’s not the same, we all know what we’re getting into, this isn’t something you’re forcing on people, and everyone stands with you out of choice.”

Grantaire watches, as though from a distance, Enjolras drain the dregs of his iced latte, the bobbing of his Adam’s apple as he swallows and then briefly ducks down to put his empty cup on the floor. Grantaire knows that he could step away, he could consider the discussion over and that Enjolras, although disappointed, would let him go but the weight of Enjolras’ eyes and the words he knows are to come hold him there as if it were Enjolras who had the power to petrify. Not for the first time, Grantaire ruminates to himself that Enjolras is so much more than human, even if he is only a man.

“You stand with me, yes. And I want to stand with you out of choice. The lives we live can only be our own to master, or else there is no point?”

He moves slowly, as not to spook Grantaire. As though Grantaire was truly as wild as his appearance dictated – truth be told he did not know any more. Where he began and the monster ended, or whether there was any difference at all, whether they had always been one even before the curse had changed him outwardly. Enjolras’ hands are warm.

His fingers have sunk deeply into the place where hair would be, were he still fully human. His snakes traitorously twist over the warm skin, and they don’t bite – Grantaire almost wishes they would, in a last ditch effort to make Enjolras understand that this is not as easy as Enjolras seems to think. He’d be more than happy living his life getting to watch, people like him don’t need to be risen up, content to let those who could, soar. And yet Enjolras is determined to drag him up to heights he wasn’t sure he could face.

Both of Enjolras’ hands are in his snakes now and Grantaire acquiesces as easy as a sigh, reaching to tighten his fingers – which only shake a fraction – into the soft lapel of Enjolras’ jacket. He could not deny Enjolras anything, not truly.

The kiss to his forehead feels like benediction.

“Thank you.”

“What for? I haven’t done anything.”

“Oh Grantaire,” the words are whispered against his forehead, like a secret not addressed to him alone, “you have been everything.”

He doesn’t reply, but the snakes hiss, and he has to close his eyes. It’s supposed to be anger, fear and pain which can trigger his sight to become lethal, but what is coursing through him at the moment feels so strong – so much richer than anything he’s ever felt before – that he has to close his eyes to keep it contained, focused within. He smiles. And keeps smiling.

They exist, they continue and life drifts between stages of elation and normality with ease. As though nothing has changed except for softer words and gentle hands. Their friends coo and smile and tease, as though they have nothing to do expect pester the pair of them. Enjolras does not mind as much as he maintains that he does, and Grantaire does not mind at all. He feels more docile, somehow, with the knowledge, even as his snakes continue to hiss and snap idly at the air.

On occasion he wonders what they would say if they could speak. Whether they would speak with one voice and one opinion, or if they would each express individual thoughts, the best and worst of Grantaire processed into separate strands of existence. Whether they would have his personality at all.

He would look less strange talking to himself if they spoke back, and he wonders whether he could bring himself to listen to his own advice, when he routinely ignores the advice of those who know and love him. If they could talk the sense into him that he is lacking himself.

There is no guilty party, in this rift which has been thrown up between the two of them which makes it harder to address. Between Grantaire’s bouts of passionate melancholy and Enjolras sharp temper, something frays and the worst part is that Grantaire can see that they are both reaching out for each other, but they are too stubborn and determined to do it together. Enjolras channels his emotions outwards, and no-one dares address – at least not during official meetings – the change in his nature, which had been balmy, smooth, spattered with flushed cheeks and bright smiles.

His snakes hiss at and extend towards Enjolras in equal measure, as though they reflect the turmoil of Grantaire’s thoughts; they have never done that before. They are both a part of his nature and wholly independent, they are the untameable. Grantaire feels untameable. Untameable, wild and cursed. It takes Joly and Bossuet get through to him, insisting on milking and talking and feeding him until Grantaire feels more man than beast. He ought to speak with Enjolras, and it is not as if Enjolras has not been trying.

There’s nothing he can say to explain himself, other than he knows how he is and it is not just the gorgon that causes him to be occasionally unpalatable. It was never truly his inhumanity but his very nature which caused Enjolras to degrade him within his thoughts. Even now that he is held in Enjolras’ regard that does not change Grantaire’s sense of self. He is slower to shed his affectations than his skin.

No lasting words have been spoken, and conflict has touched many of them. It is not just Enjolras and Grantaire who are strained, even Combeferre and Courfeyrac have gripped with each other where normally comradery would have flourished. They are all struggling under the weight that they bare. It is just a shock, from the weeks of softness to remember Enjolras’ harsh edges, but they are harsh edges that Grantaire has known and loved, and most importantly accepted long before he was known, and loved and accepted by Enjolras himself. There is work to be done, on many levels, the society is attempted to organise a debate while exams and coursework and the demands of work are taking pot shots out of them all, and this thing between them is so new and precious that it feels far too tempting to declare it too difficult to handle without cracking.

Maybe Enjolras can make an optimist of him yet, because he has to at least try. They can’t be out at the first hurdle, they’re both too stubborn. Which he supposes is part of the problem. While he mas many words none of them are enough. They were both at fault, over everything and nothing, and it while it has only been days, he feels colder without Enjolras’ hands in his snakes and a leant jacket dropped over his shoulders in the chill of early evening. He knows what he can do, the gesture he can make. Enjolras reached out to him, he can do the same.

His attendance wasn’t expected, for a myriad of reasons least because it’s only a small scale event, indoors and seated as opposed to loud and threatening. Either way visible nonhumans stand out, even in an inclusive campus, and while this new world that Enjolras and his merry band of heroes want to force into existence is for the liberty of all people like him draw unwanted attention especially while they stand and watch and look sinister instead of earnest. Normally he didn’t contribute enough, sitting at the back of wherever they were hosting, commenting idly and hissing during the silences.

But Courfeyrac was right, a gorgon standing by the main stage quiets those who are starting to look irate about the opinions being bandied about, those who might seek to cause trouble when the room filters empty. Sunglasses on or sunglasses off it makes no differences, he cannot hide what he is and he has never wanted to. But nor has it ever felt like effort and achievement in one to stand to observe and be observed. His snakes are protective, of everyone, but they have a soft spot for Enjolras - as though they are not a part of Grantaire’s being - and they hiss and spit and stand on end, as dark as night in the dimmed red glowing light.

It is a cheap intimidation tactic but an effective one, and technically none-more underhand that Bahorel flexing his pecs standing at the doorway, but it still feels like something.

Enjolras didn’t falter his speech when he entered, and he doesn’t falter now, as he finalises with a nod towards the Chair and steps away from the microphone. Enjolras smiles at everyone, casting his eyes deliberately around the well filled hallway, but also at him, making sure to look down while Grantaire is looking up. As he downs from the stage make room for Feuilly to speak he gently and deliberately casts his hand over the back of Grantaire’s neck; the snakes hiss in contentment and he cannot imagine that with the grin creeping up his face that anyone, at that moment, could fear him. He knows that it’s a thank you, and he knows that they’ll speak later, speak with real words. But he can’t help briefly taking that hand in his own and drawing it up to his mouth to press as kiss to the knuckles as he passes. He knows better than to make a scene, but the rich flush that the action paints across Enjolras’ high cheekbones causes him to press his smile further into the delicate bones before drawing his hand away. Enjolras squeezes, once and even as his fingers drop it does not feel as though he lets go.

Grantaire stays standing, and the smile doesn’t fade.

Later, his sunglasses are left on Enjolras’ bedside cabinet and the heating in Enjolras’ merger flat has been cranked up as high as it can get, and even so Grantaire tightens his grip around Enjolras’ body in an unconscious search for warmth.

“Clingy,” Enjolras had said before turning his face into the coil of snakes, too tired to turn fully to reach Grantaire’s face, pressing a dry and tired kiss amid the scales, “I like it, it’s a reminder.”

Grantaire hadn’t asked what it was a reminder of, only wound his arms more firmly around Enjolras, taking his body heat for his own and letting sleep finally overtake them. There are more words to be spoken in the morning, answers and questions, something heart achingly honest, but for now, they are warm and together and content.

**Author's Note:**

> (The word ‘snake’ is in this fic 37 times, and the word ‘hiss’ is in there only 13. I am very impressed with my restraint.)
> 
> And if you're interested in the perceptions of gorgons in nineteenth century revolutionary politics come and talk to me at [villierscy](http://villierscy.tumblr.com/) because I have the feeling that I might be examining this idea in a canon setting at some point, there's a lot of information out there about gorgons and French revolutionary politics and society, and I think I read all of it without including any of it in this fic.


End file.
